Still not fixed.
Well the Sex Offender laws in the US are total and absolute BS and demonstrate that all of America must have stupid juice in their water anyhow...
I meant Canada... The land of sanity.
But think of all the people that have been saved by such registries! Here's a list:
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Those lists are just fodder for
moral panic.Personally, I would say that the contributing factors that lead to people becoming sexual predators have been around for basically as long as there have been modern humans, and that as a result, I dont think there are going to be any shocking changes in the total per-capita rates of production for genuine sexual predators for several decades, if not several centuries. What has changed, IMO, is the total population density of an area, and thus the increased likelihood that you will at some point bump into one such person.
(EG, we will use a fictitious number of 1% per capita for sexual predator population vs normal population. In dark age europe, you would have had a population of only a few hundred thousand over much of the region-- so, you could walk for miles and miles around, and may never encounter such a person. However, in the modern post-industrial setting, where we still keep that same 1% rate, we can have several hundred people living in just a quarter mile block radius. That means that on a densely populated block, you can have 2 or 3 predators right next to you.)
The original intent was that registries like this would enable this compactified population to know which 2 or 3 people in their block to keep their kids/daughters/whatevers away from for their protection.
Instead, they have become a pillory for modern mud slinging, because the bar to entry is VERY low, and once on that list, you have no chance of ever getting removed from it. (Flirting at somebody who takes offense can actually get you on such a list. That's how low the barrier to admission is.)
So, now you have a horribly inflated metric (instead of the 1% actual dangerous predators, you have some 20ish% figure of the population thrown in too), which causes social panic (OMG! Look at all the predators! We GOTTA KEEP OUR KIDS SAFE! We GOTTA make laws STRICTER to protect our /whatevers/!!) Which in turn, just further exacerbates to the problem.
This should be an abject lesson in why knee-jerk, emotionally charged decision making is NOT suitable for public policy, but people never feel satisfied with that, and seem to always want to do what makes them FEEL better, at that particular instant.
Throw in the media hysterics churning up that shit filled cauldron to drum up ratings, and you have a pretty nasty thing indeed.
Welcome to America.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14954588 times)